Simply put, it’s good business to talk about the business. When a company is committed to giving its employees all the tools they need to succeed, no single tool is as critical as the strategy of the business—especially for capital-intensive, fast-paced technological initiatives. It is the obligation of those that manage technical teams, departments or personnel to provide appropriate business context for their work, and to reinforce that the business strategy through regular and ongoing activities:

• Project inception: no better time to frame the business strategy, and where a particular project or task figures into the company’s agenda, than when before pencil hits the paper
• Regular staff and project meetings: business objectives are an excellent ‘table setting’ for discussion of project status, task assignments, roles and responsibilities, etc., and help keep diverse teams aligned to a common purpose
• Performance reviews: nothing reinforces an employee’s relationship to the company’s mission better than compensation; just be sure that these parameters are established up front and that people aren’t being rewarded—or punished—for goals they were unaware they were expected to meet

Communicating the business strategy, however, is not the sole province of those in management; technical personnel need to insist, if needed, that managers convey the broader business context of their work. And while not everyone is entitled to a copy of the strategic plan before starting a project or task, all employees deserve to know the few essential components of their company’s business strategy:

• Vision: what the company aspires to be in five or 10 years; the über context for everyone’s work
• Values: fundamental principles by which the company operates and that guide how everyone within it must think, act and deliver at all times, in all situations
• Strategic business goals: what the enterprise aims to accomplish over the next 12-18 months and that most powerfully shape the complexion of a product or service portfolio at any given time
• Customer choice drivers: what customers care about most in selecting a particular product or service, which can be translated easily into functional criteria, feature sets, operational parameters and preferred technical platforms

At the end of the day, business strategy becomes the lingua franca, or common language, of today’s technologically driven business. It is management’s obligation to share and employees’ right to expect if the organization wants to position itself for sustained business success.

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Beth Zimmerman is principal of Cerebellas LLC, a business-to-business strategic advisory company serving organizations and C-level executives around the world with customer intelligence, market and business strategy, organizational alignment and public speaking. If you have questions or comments on this topic, or would like to speak with Beth, please contact us.